14 DAY TRIAL // My first day at School starts with a rock pigeon that I have known since childhood joking with me about my ability to actually get up early, and it continues with a series of other birds that present themselves and suggest their personality types and their quirks.
The weirdness level increases when each of the creatures reveals a human face and body, designed by the team at Mediatonic to give gamers a reference point about the animal that they are interested in pursuing a romance with.
About half an hour after first starting Hatoful Boyfriend, I am no longer weirded out by the constant presence of the various birds and I am fully focused on gaining the attention of the high class aristocrat bird that failed to acknowledge my existence on the first day of school.
I do have other options, like the math teacher who’s falling asleep and the longtime friend from childhood, and I am sure that other typologies, like the bad boy or the creep, will quickly make an appearance.
I am fixated on the aristocrat pigeon because I want to break his heart after he falls for me, the hunter gatherer human female, in order to show him that even in this weird fantasy world we are the dominating species, especially when it comes to love.
How long does weirdness last?
Video games tend to ask modern players to suspend their disbelief on a daily basis, accepting that the stars have been colonized or that the undead can actually rise from their graves in order to attack humanity.
But no Halo or Resident Evil feels as organically weird as Hatoful Boyfriend does, even if its only major change from other dating sims is that it takes humans out and introduces pigeons in their place.
The feeling is generated by the very fact that the world in the game seems like our own, although it's viewed through a very Japanese lens, and at the same time, introduces an element that is utterly foreign.
I sometimes thought about horror while playing Hatoful Boyfriend and about how easy it would be to use the setting of the game to power a title about fear rather than one about romance.
And then I realized that this might be something that the developers behind the title might be attempting to do, even as I found out that I was unable to romance my chosen bird.
And then, just as the weirdness was wearing out, I was cruelly assassinated.